"It depends," he said, "on what you mean by happy. Our measure of happiness, it seems to me, depends entirely on what we _have_ compared with what we want. If I had never met you, I could never have missed you; and so I dare say I might have settled down happily enough--or what I considered happily enough--with some other girl. But that is impossible now. I have met you, you see. If I were to lose you"--Tilly caught her breath sharply--"no one else could ever take your place. Love like ours makes all substitutes tasteless and colourless, as they say in chemical laboratories. You have raised my standard of love so high that no one but yourself can ever attain to it. So," concluded the philosopher, with a smile which brought more happiness and reassurance into Tilly’s heart than all the laborious logic-chopping in the world could have done, "though I don’t know that I never _could_ have been happy with any one but you, I can truly say this, that I never _can_ be happy with any one but you. It’s merely a matter of the difference between two conditional sentences, that’s all." But a girl talking with her lover is not interested in points of syntax. "And will you go on loving me?" asked Tilly, putting a small but unerring finger upon the joint in Dicky’s harness. Dicky glanced down upon the eager, wistful face beside him, and smiled whimsically. "Madam," he said, "your fears are groundless." "How do you know?" enquired Madam, convinced in her heart, but anxious to be reassured. "Because," said Dicky simply, "you love me. You have said it. Don’t you see how that binds me to you? The mere fact of your love for me makes mine for you imperishable. The moment a man discovers that the woman he loves loves him in return, he is hers, body and soul. Previous to that something has held him back. Pride--reserve--caution--call it what you like--it _has_ held him back. He has not let himself go _utterly_. After all, we can only give of our best once in this life, and usually some instinct inside us makes us refuse to surrender that best, however prodigal we may have been of the inferior article, until we know that we are going to get the best in return." Dicky was talking very earnestly now. "I have been keeping my best for you all these years, little maid, though neither of us knew it. Such as it is, you have it. That is why I _know_ I can never go back on you. Besides, what man worthy of the name could let a girl down, once she had abandoned her reserve--her beautiful woman’s reserve--and confessed her great secret to him? Why, I once nearly married a girl whom I could not stand at any price, just because the little idiot gave herself away one day when we were alone together." "Why should you have married her," asked single-minded, feminine Tilly wonderingly, "if you did n’t love her?" "It seemed so mean not to," said Dicky. Tilly nodded her head gravely.